The Munk Debates Podcast - Anne Applebaum on the future of democracy

Episode Date: December 30, 2020

Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer-prize winning author and staff writer at The Atlantic, on the future of democracy in an era of populist politics and rising authoritarianism. The host of the Munk Debates is Rudyard Griffiths - @rudyardg.   For detailed show notes on the episode, head to https://munkdebates.com/podcast. Tweet your comments about this episode to @munkdebate or comment on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/munkdebates/ To sign up for a weekly email reminder for this podcast, send an email to [e-mail]. To support civil and substantive debate on the big questions of the day, consider becoming a Munk Member at https://munkdebates.com/membership Members receive access to our 10+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, newsletter and ticketing privileges at our live events. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue - https://munkdebates.com/ The Munk Debates podcast is produced by Antica, Canada's largest private audio production company - https://www.anticaproductions.com/   Executive Producer: Stuart Coxe, CEO Antica Productions Senior Producer: Christina Campbell Editor: Kieran Lynch Associate Producer: Abhi RahejaBecome a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I think it's time for this toxic binary zero-sum madness to stop. We're not an imperial power. We're a revolutionary power. We are no longer in a world where you can plot out moves statesmen to statesmen like a chessboard. You don't know anything about my background to where I came from. It doesn't matter to you because fundamentally I'm a mean white man. We can't do this to the next generation because America will cease to exist. Thanks for listening to The Monk Debates. For the holiday period, we are changing up the format for this podcast. Instead of a debate, we're doing in-depth interviews with some of the world's smartest thinkers on the big issues of our time.

From the future of liberal democracy to America's growing rivalry with China to the next shock or revolution, which could define the 21st century. This miniseries is called The Monk Dialogues. On this installment of the Monk Dialogs, we feature Anne Applebaum, best-selling author on The Future of Democracy, in an era of populist politics and rising authoritarianism. Here is her dialogue with Monk Debates chair, Rudyard Griffiths. Hi, I'm Rudyard Griffiths, the host of the Monk Dialogues. We're exceedingly fortunate to have on the program one of,

I think our most thoughtful commentators on the fate and future of democracy today. We know her well as Anne Applebaum. She's the European-based staff writer with the Atlantic. She's a Pulitzer Prize winning author. All kinds of great books that are on your and my bookshelves, Gulag, that book that book that won her, the Pulitzer Prize, Iron Curtain, Red Famine, and her latest book, a must read, the twilight of democracy. She joins us now on the Monk Dialogues, and great to have you back. Thanks for having me.

Well, I'm really looking forward to this conversation today. You're someone who's been writing and thinking about not just democracy, but the origins of authoritarianism, of totalitarianism, in Europe especially. I really enjoyed your latest book, and I wanted to pull out a couple of the key quotes that I think help frame the question. core ideas that you are bringing forward for all of us to kind of reflect on and discuss.

So let's start off with this quote out of the book because I think it's going to give our audience a sense of the essence of what you're addressing. Quote, something is going on right now, something that is affecting very different democracies with very different economics and very different demographics all over the world. So, and what is that something? So the something is the change in the nature of information and the change in the nature of politics that has evolved out of that change. One of the theses of the book is that when you look around the world, I first experienced it in Poland, but I saw versions of it taking place in the United States and the United Kingdom and other European countries. I write a little bit in the book about Spain.

I could have written about a lot of other countries. we see that there is a disenchantment with democracy and with existing democratic institutions. There's a frustration with the slowness of politics. And above all, we see that there is a division in what used to be the public sphere in a lot of countries. So if there was ever something like a public space, you know, in the U.S. or in Canada or in other democracies, where political opponents could battle it out on some kind of even playing field or where where arguments took place in a way that everybody was listening to both sides, that in many, many countries is now gone.

People now exist inside their own echo chambers. They don't hear one another's arguments. And the arguments themselves have become more extreme. The nature of modern media, it's not just social media, although, of course, the algorithms that govern social media are an important part of it. But the nature of 24-hour news, the nature of the way we get our news on our phones, without any kind of hierarchy, we get one message about an advertisement for hairspray, and then we get another message, which is something from our cousin,

and then we learn about a war in Gorno-Karabakh, the inability to put any of those things into some kind of hierarchy. All of that has meant that people find politics confusing. There's a lot of noise and cacophony, and people want simple, straighter answers. They want to weigh through all of this information. and one of the results of that change, I think, is that there's a disillusionment with democratic institutions of all kinds in a lot of different places. And is there right to say, and I don't mean this pejoratively at all, but that we've lost a kind of

an elite, moderated public square. We've lost a conversation where information has been prioritized for the public, synthesized, and presented in ways that give priority to. a kind of dialogue of democracy. Is that what's missing here? Some kind of critical elite function in shaping the dialogue of democracy? It's not even an elite function necessarily because, for example, one of the big missing pieces now in the U.S., but not only in the U.S. actually, is that we've lost a lot of local and regional news. The business model of smaller newspapers just doesn't work anymore, and so we've seen the collapse of local media and local reporting. It's not just the lack of a kind of curated conversation at the top, it goes actually all the way to the bottom

in which politics is no longer about real events that happen in real life, and instead, to a great degree, it's shifted into a completely different realm. And one of the reasons why celebrities and people who are good at social media are doing so well at politics in so many different places is that people no longer see why one of the people who appears on their screens, who is a pop star and another person who appears on their screens, who's a president, what's the difference between them? Why should one be more important than the other? It's not just an elite conversation, it's even more that there's any separate political conversation or any sense that politics is about reality at all.

And how do you respond to the argument you know it well, that people will say that elites have used democracy, late 20th century and early 21st century democracy, to exploit their position of privilege for themselves. They've exploited it economically. They've exploited it in terms of trying to shape the public conversation and debate. And really the failure of people turning away from democracy, of embracing populism and authoritarianism, there's an underlying validity to that movement on the basis of an elite failure to deliver growth, to deliver the things that people need to materially experience a better life than that, let's say, that their parents had. So even by asking that a question, you've made a big assumption about who are the

elites and who are the people who are challenging these so-called elites. You know, when I take a step back and I look at the political argument, I mean, if we just stick to the United States, although my book is about other countries as well, what I see is not, you know, an argument between, I don't know, ordinary people on one side and rich people on the other side. I see a competition between different kinds of elites and the use of different tactics on the part of those elites. And I see that one elite group inside the United States, which is taken over a part of the Republican Party, has decided that it's in its interests to attack not just their political opponents, but the political system itself. This is playing out right now in the aftermath of a U.S. election that President Trump lost,

and he's seeking to use the dissatisfaction of voters and of funders and others to create an anti-democratic movement that will overthrow the election. Who is curating, who's organizing, who's pushing this movement. It's an elite group. It's Trump. It's the leaders of the party. It's some members of the Senate. It's some local Republican leaders. It's Republican political columnists and the very, very wealthy Fox News hosts. There is an elite group who see it is in their interests to undermine American democracy and make Americans fear that the election has been stolen. So what I see is a competition between different kinds of elites. As I say, I see that one group has decided that democracy itself is now a tool that it can use against its political

opponents. Excellent. Fair analysis and an original point. So I appreciate that. Let's go to the second quote from your recent book that I want to put to you. You say, quote, given the right conditions, any society can turn against democracy. Indeed, if history is anything to go by, all of our societies eventually will. I mean, that is a fascinating statement. And there's much to unpack there. Are you saying that we're at that Findersecla moment, that, you know, the end is nigh? And if it is, what comes next? Is there a new reiteration of democracy? Is the rush towards populism and authoritarianism, in your view, possibly inevitable? It's too seductive. It's too hard to push back from? Give us a sense of where we go from here. So when I wrote that, my intention was

not to say that there's something inevitable happening, you know, that our democracy will die next week and there's nothing we can do about it. I didn't believe in historical inevitability at all, and I don't believe that any country is ever condemned to any outcome. But I do think that all of us have forgotten, you know, given the incredible luck that we've enjoyed, we being, we Americans, we Canadians, we Europeans in the last several decades since the Second World War and even more so since the end of the Cold War. You know, we've enjoyed this incredible period of prosperity and expansion in which our societies were admired and copied by so many others,

in which we became complacent about what our democracies were. And we've forgotten that most of the founders of our democracy, this is particularly true in the United States, always had in the back of their heads the idea that democracy could fail. So the founders who designed the U.S. Constitution, you know, the U.S. Constitution was not designed for an ideal world in which all human beings are good, you know, and in which no bad people will ever appear. You know, it wasn't designed with this idea that Americans are somehow special or different or superhuman. And on the contrary, it was designed by people who feared, you know, who were reading the history of Greece and Rome, who knew that democracies had failed in the past, had very often turned into tyrannies, who were reading about, you know, Caesar, and the fall of the Roman Republic, and who knew that a dictator or a tyrant or a demagogue could come along and upset the system. And the rules of American democracy, some of which are

pretty inachronistic today and can seem pretty weird, those were all written the way they were written because the founders wanted to prevent demagogues from coming to power. So the point is that I wanted to remind people that this has always been the case. You know, American democracy has always been, it was always possible to overthrow it. And it was always possible to overthrow it. was overthrown once in the past. I mean, that's what, you know, that's what the Civil War was, a portion of some of the American states

seceded from the Union because they didn't want to adhere to the will of the majority. And they feared that the election of President Lincoln meant that they would have to end slavery and they didn't want, they objected. And so the idea that there, you know, that there's something new about democracy being fragile or that democracy, you know, has never been

under challenge like this before. I mean, that's just a historical. And the point of it is, you know, is that all of our democracies do need this kind of constant vigilance. Actually, it turns out that it's really important to be engaged in politics all the time, and that it's important to be part of parties, that parties can't be allowed to atrophy. And the need to keep people engaged and to make sure that people understand what's going on in democracy is just, is greater than ever. But unless we have that sense that democracy could be in danger and is indeed always

in danger, that, you know, unless we're all engaged, it could fall apart. Then I think we, you know, then we do run real risks that it will. Yeah, that's a really important message. And the final quote board, Anne, I want to put to you before we go to audience questions is, is the following, quote, maybe fear of the disease will create fear of freedom or maybe the coronavirus will inspire a new sense of global solidarity. We have to accept that both these futures are possible. And you kind of finish this book and you're thinking in its pages as this pandemic began to ravage the world. Where are you at, you know, a period of time now later in terms of that tension between how this coronavirus will impact democracy? We've seen a fascinating range of responses in terms of public health and the suppression of this virus in democracies versus.

autocracies. It's a mixed record, frankly, in both camps, but I'd be fascinated to know how you think COVID-19 will impact the future trajectory, both of democracy and of authoritarianism and populism. Certainly at the beginning, the initial phase of this, it looked like it was going to be a good moment for autocracy, perhaps more accurately for illiberal leaders in democracy. So anybody who who shut their borders, who immediately reasserted, you know, created emergency law, was initially very popular. You know, looking back through human history, I wrote something about this last spring, you know, pandemics and terrible ways of disease almost always end with an expansion of the power of the state. And because when people are afraid, they are willing to exchange their

freedom in response for a feeling of safety. But this is a modern era. And one of the things that people want out of the pandemic, again, they want safety. And as many people began to turn to science and to expertise as the font of, you know, as the source of safety and the source of solutions for this pandemic, in a lot of places, these liberal language and nationalist language began to wear pretty thin. And actually, if you take a step back and you look, you know, more generally at countries that have done better or worse, the ones that have done better are not necessarily democracies or autocracies. The ones that have done better are the ones where there's a lot of trust in the state and particularly in the public health bureaucracy, where there's, where scientists

have been allowed to play an important role in controlling the virus, where so-called populist or anti-science or anti-state movements haven't made huge progress. But the battle lines aren't as clearly drawn as many would like them to be. I mean, even the question of China, which is a complicated one because the Chinese have controlled the virus for the most part inside their country. You know, you then have to take a step back and ask, you know, the origins of the virus lie in China. China lied about the virus at the very beginning and tried to repress the doctors and scientists who were writing about it initially. Even the record of successful states shows that, you know, successful autocracy shows that, you know, shows that autocracy is not a solution to this,

you know, by any means. The solutions, you know, see. to lie, as I say, in trust, in public health, in social solidarity, and in states where people are willing to listen to are more interest anyway in engaging with facts rather than mythology. Before I go to questions, Anne, I've got to ask you about Russia. You've been a long-term observer of Russia. You've written a number of books about Russian history. Russia has been a meddler, to put it mildly, in the fate and future of democracy in Europe. and around the world, if we look back at the 2016 U.S. election. How has this coronavirus affected the government of Vladimir Putin,

their authority and their ability to, frankly, continue to potentially be a threat to Western liberal democracy? Is this a setback? Is Putin weathering this storm? What is your assessment? So remember that Russia's threat to us is. not a military threat or not necessarily. I mean, he may be a military threat to some of his immediate neighbors. Russia's status, you know, threat to us was always in the realm of disinformation,

in the realm of corruption, in the realm of political meddling, of the buying and selling of politicians and of political parties inside some democracies. And much of that continues. You know, I've seen some evidence that shows Russian links to anti-vaccines. material, for example. And this actually goes back, dates back to before the coronavirus. So the Russians are interested in pushing anti-science, anti-rationality, those kinds of narratives in all of our countries. I mean, I suppose the unexpected part of the story is that the American president has been pushing anti-vaccine, anti-science messaging as well. I mean, I think he's probably done more damage in the realm of disinformation, certainly in the last year than the Russians have.

I mean, look down the road, Russia is a economically, you know, a weakened state. The coronavirus has also caused huge levels of distrust of the state there. There's a lot of bad information in Russia, actually. It's not even that clear. The virus's initial hit in some big Russian cities was covered up. It was unclear what was happening to a lot of people. You know, there were stories about flu and pneumonia rather than the virus. So I imagine that it will also have the impact in Russia that's had in other places of creating more

distrust for the state and more, you know, more people having a sense of that the state is illegitimate. But taking a step back, as I say, what was Russia good at? What did Russia teach Western politicians? It was good at this undermining of narratives, undermine faith in democracy, undermine faith in science, you know, all those things. And they continue. It's just that those kinds of narratives are now so strong inside our own democracies that I don't know that the Russian ones matter as much as they used to. Hi there, Rudyard Griffiths, the moderator of the Monk Debates. Look, this we know.

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And the first question comes from Dan Monroe, he's asking. Barack Obama has been quoted as saying, if we do not have the capacity to distinguish what is true from what is false, then by definition, the marketplace of ideas doesn't work. by definition, our democracy doesn't work. So Dan is asking you, do you agree with Obama's characterization that democracy flat out isn't working? So I read that Obama's statement as meaning,

if this comes to be true, in other words, if we can't have a conversation that's about reality, then democracy won't work. I'm not sure he was saying it's all over already. And knowing him and having read that whole interview, I think that's the best way to interpret it. But I certainly agree with the basic idea, and it's close to what you and I started talking about at the beginning of this conversation, which is that democracy depends on there being some kind of, I mean, marketplace of ideas is maybe not a great expression, but some kind of neutral ground. You know, there is some agreed upon facts in which we can all have different opinions.

We can have a right-wing opinion or a left-wing opinion or a green opinion or a libertarian. opinion, but nevertheless, we all agree what the facts are and we agree with the problem is. It's just that we have different answers to it or different solutions. When we start all having different facts and when we can therefore no longer have a debate about how to solve the problem, then it does get to be hard to see how democracy works. And this is why the idea of the reconstruction of the public sphere or some of the experiments that have been done in a number of countries about looking for new ways to unite people or create online or offline conversations with people are so important because we are losing, you know, we are losing the public sphere. We are losing the place where we can have a

neutral debate. What's the potential really for that kind of rebuilding, for that reinforcing to incur when on the other side you've got, as you've mentioned, you know, Vladimir Putin's Russia actively interfering. You have Facebook, Twitter, these massive multi-billion dollar companies. that have created this new and at times frightening information kind of ecosystem. I mean, these just seem like massive, monumental forces kind of wrenching our democracy apart. Why do we think that, you know, coffee clutches and people volunteering, you know, at polling stations is really anything other than putting a, you know, a finger in the dike? No, I mean, no, I didn't mean to say that, you know, grassroots political organizing was going to fix

every problem. You know, someday I hope you and I will have a longer conversation about this. I mean, I am really interested in the question of, it's not so much social media regulation, but internet regulation and that can be done not just in the United States, but in conjunction with other democracies, that would look very deeply at the question of what do we want a democratic internet to look like. So we know already what the autocratic internet looks like because China has created it. We know what the Chinese have done. They've used all the technologies, the nudging, the manipulation, and they've used it to create a Chinese internet, which gives the government more control and a more ability to monitor the population. What do we want the liberal democratic

internet to look like? We've never really had that conversation. We've let it be determined by private companies, by some historical accident. And we haven't, you know, we haven't thought as society, is what we want to do about it. And it is, I agree. And by this, by the way, I didn't mean censorship or, you know, the question of what should or shouldn't be taken down. I mean much more, more fundamental questions about, you know, company, you know, what power the companies should have, how big they should be, questions about anonymity, questions about transparency, questions about who decides what the algorithms are. These are very, still very new technologies. And we haven't really grappled with the idea of how to make them work for us,

rather than allowing them to divide us. But I don't think it's an impossible problem, although I agree that it's a longer-term conversation. Oh, that's great. I want to get a question up on the board here from Will Douglas. This is a question that was emailed in earlier. Quote, I regularly encounter people who show a hearty disdain for any effort to unearth and prove a link between Donald Trump's campaign and foreign policy to various strategies

and tactics of Putin government. what has been your experience in this and give us your reaction? I mean, one of the effects of the events of the last four, five, six years has been that the broad camp of people who used to consider themselves center right has divided. And this is true in a lot of countries. This is true in Poland, which is where I live part of the time. It's true in the U.S., which is where I'm from. It's true in the U.K., which is where I spent many years and worked for a long time.

you can see this division in the right in a lot of places. And, you know, a part of the center right, well, what used to be the center right or the anti-communist right in some in Eastern Europe, or the Reaganite right or the Thatcher right, however you want to describe it, you know, part of that grouping still sees itself as part of a big international coalition, which is pro-democracy and which believes in working together with allies against enemies and so on. And then part of that group has gone off in a more radical direction. And they have turned against many of the things that they used to believe in. And one of the odder things that's happened, I mean, really odd, is that a number of them have decided that rather than being, you know, pro-NATO and pro-American

and pro-Canadian and pro-this grand alliance of Western democracies, they prefer to be pro-Russian, You know, they go along with Putin's anti-democratic language. They accept his critique of Western democracy as fake and ineffective. They agree with the tactics that he's used to try and undermine democracy in a number of places. And, you know, my original objection to Donald Trump, long before he became president, was that he, from the beginning of his campaign, he was using, you know, language that came from Russian sources. I mean, he was accused, there was a moment during the campaign where he accused Hillary Clinton of being, of having, Obama of having founded ISIS of Hillary Clinton wanting to start World War III. And these were all tropes and comments and ideas that were coming directly from Russian propaganda. And so from the beginning, I saw him as somebody who identified himself with that anti-democratic, that cynical way of seeing the world. And it was, has been very shocking to me that not everybody, but a few. people in the general world of, I don't know, Republican or conservative or Tory politics took

up those same kinds of lines. What is that? I mean, what leads people down that rabbit hole? I mean, is it a, is it just a kind of an abandonment of the ideals of democracy in their own society? Is it just a sense that the system isn't working for them and, and, and, and a kind of victim mentality? I mean, you're right. It really is a 180-degree turn from people to go from being, you know, a Reagan Republican to, you know, a Putin pundit on Fox News. I don't have a single answer.

There isn't one explanation. The only thing that I would say that links a lot of the different people who I profile in the book is a profound sense of disappointment. They are disappointed with the societies they live in. In some cases, it's to do with demographics. change or social changes that they don't like. In some cases, it's to do with a feeling of moral decline, very similar to the kinds of feeling of moral decline that people have had in rapidly changing societies in the past. I mean, one of the things about all of our societies

is that we are living through a period of really just unbelievably rapid change in everything, economics, culture, social mores, as well as information. And in the course of that, rapid change, things do get lost or forgotten or left behind. And there are people for whom, you know, who feel that element things were lost or things they remember from their childhood or their past about their societies have disappeared. So they're not wrong in many cases to say that something has changed irrevocably. But this feeling of disappointment or in some cases, nostalgia, sometimes becomes very acute, so much so that it becomes not just disappointment, but actual anger and despair. And once you are at that point, once you believe that your

society is dead or dying or finished or ending, this is when you become radical, because if it's dead or dying, then you might as well smash it all up and start again. And this is the origin, by the way, of left-wing radicalism as well as right-wing radicalism. Deep, disappointment, anger, cynicism about the system, belief that it can't work, that it's no longer serving people. And then, as I say, I use a few examples of the book, in some cases, this is connected with people's personal disappointment. You know, I should be doing better or I should be doing something different or this political

system has kept me back. So there's some, sometimes it's personal as well, but I will say that for many of them, it's not just personal. It is ideological. They think our societies are dead. and therefore any radical change, however destructive, can be forgiven. Let's go just to build on this. We've got a question here from Jonathan Mertz, who's asking us online, given the lack of a clear,

positive political direction and it's largely decentralized structure, do you think this new brand of populist authoritarianism is capable of building a new political order, or is it, again, purely, as you're just discussing, Anne, just about tearing down a kind of nihilism, engagement with what is before us? So the answer depends. And the answer depends on what happens when these kinds of populist political parties take power. You know, look, in Poland, again, populace is not a word I love, but I'll go on using it because people seem to intuitively understand what it means.

I would call them anti-pluralist or anti-democratic parties. But in Poland, a populist party took power and immediately set about trying to undermine the independent court system. So there was an illegal assault on the constitutional tribunal. There was a takeover of state media. There was a takeover of a whole range of other kinds of institutions, a destruction of the civil service, of the diplomatic service. And all of those changes gave the ruling party all kinds of political advantages and made it, you know, gave it a lasting power that makes it much more difficult to dislodge. And the same is often true if you look at these kinds of populist parties, another country, you look at Turkey.

Erdogan's party, why is it still in power? Well, partly because it's eliminated sometimes or arrested or jailed its opponents, because it's made it harder to function as an opposition, you know, in the opposition. The same can be said of Viktor Orban's Hungary, where some, you know, I think it's over 90% of the media is controlled one way or another by the ruling party. So once these kinds of parties take over, they can harm and undermine and all, or institutions so that they don't lose again. And that is the purpose. I mean, that's why they're doing it. I mean, the, you know, what's happening in the United States this week is a little farcical.

But the purpose of seeking to overthrow the votes of people in Michigan, the purpose of that is to take power and to keep power and keep the presidency, even though Donald Trump has lost it. And in, there are a lot of countries where that's been done more effectively. It's actually harder to do in the United States because our federal system makes it, you know, and for other reasons, it's more difficult. But in a centralized country, I mean, taking over the levers of power and eliminating the kind of, you know, the possibility that an opposition party could could someday unseat the ruling party. I mean, this can be done a lot more easily. So, I mean, this is the end game. This is the reason these parties do what they do. It's not just to be disruptive and wreck things,

although in many cases, that's why people go along with it. The reason ultimately is then to establish power to promote a new elite and to create a new kind of political system. And we do see in a few countries that it's working. Yeah, it's a fascinating analysis. And in that point about a new elite is absolutely key. This is not a kind of democratic revolution of the people for the people. We had a question emailed in by previously by David Bork. asking, what do you think of Klaus Schwab's Great Reset? Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appears to similarly

embrace the idea of a sweeping reworking of the existing social, economic, and international order. And just have you reflect on this idea that is emerging, again, in certain elite circles, that this pandemic and maybe the continuing after effects of the great financial crisis, require a much bigger set of international and domestic, political, and social reforms, a real reworking of the social and international and economic order. I mean, is that just kind of, I don't know, Davos Palaver, or, you know, is there an idea there that needs to be considered seriously and is it at all realistic? So I think it's true that the pandemic has given a lot of people the feeling that there are deep things wrong in our societies and that simply finding the vaccine won't cure

them. You know, that clearly one of the economic impacts of the pandemic has been to make inequality deeper. It's shown the importance of all kinds of, whether hospital workers or even, you know, grocery store workers or people who work in delivery companies, the importance of people who are living in very precarious ways in many of our societies and it made it clear that just how unfair our systems are. And so people are hoping that the pandemic will bring about some real changes. I mean, one of the things I'm most afraid of is that, in fact, the pandemic will bring about very little change because simply people will have the feeling of, you know, we're just

scrabbling out of a hole in order to get back to where we were before. One of the things I'm hoping that happens with the Biden administration is that when it takes over, it has a close look at some of the international and other institutions that have failed, both during the pandemic and previously, and that it does begin some deeper thinking about how we, particularly about how we can renew our alliances, how democracies could work together. I mean, for example, on some of the issues we've just talked about, how they can work together on rethinking, how we use the internet, whether they can work together on climate change, whether they can work together on, you know, big international public health issues,

whether we can come up with more democratic answers as an international community. I mean, you know, European, Asian, American, and other democracies, how we can push back against the pressure from Russia and China, how we can, how we can answer some of those things as a community rather than doing it, each one on our own. I mean, those are the things that I hope will come out of it. But I'm skeptical of too much idealism. I'm also skeptical of the ability that people are going to have, particularly in the next few months,

to make any big and very creative changes, given how much catching up there is to do. But I guess I agree with the premise of the question, which is that, yes, I do think the pandemic and other things, and really the Trump presidency, frankly, revealed that there are a lot of our institutions, both domestic international, are a lot weaker than we thought they were.

and they are in need of pretty deep repair. Okay, and I want to just squeeze and get a quick answer here from Richard Christensen. He's asking, there are so many threats to democracy across the world. Populism, authoritarianism appear to become entrenched in several countries. What are some behaviors and activities that the average citizen can do to help democracy survive? I think that's a great question to end on you. gave us a sense earlier in this conversation of some of those activities, but maybe just go a bit deeper for us. What practically can we do to help our liberal democratic values and institutions

not just survive, but hopefully flourish in this period that you rightly describe of rapid, urgent, challenging change? First of all, all of us should remember that nowadays, all of us are publishers and all of us are editors and all of us are journalists. So the first thing to do is to make sure that whatever it is that you're doing on social media is useful. Make sure that what you repeat and say is based on some kind of reporting. And make sure that you are always seeking to reach out to people on the other side as well. In your personal life, find people who you disagree with and try and talk to them. I mean, I think one of the things that we're all going to have to try and find ways to do is bridge this, you know, these deep gaps created.

by polarization and accelerated by social media and by politicians in whose interest it is to keep people divided. So I think in a personal way, whether you're online or offline, you can help to bridge those gaps yourself. Secondly, I would say join a political party. Be part of a local election, whether it's for the school board or the county sheriff or it doesn't really matter.

It doesn't have to be a national election. Try and participate in the political process yourself locally. the more people who are involved and the more grounded, civic-minded people who are involved in the process, the better. And that's something that, you know, again, that everybody, you know, can do. I mean, beyond that, I mean, there is, you know, there are lots and lots of initiatives that promote civic education that promote democratic conversation. I mean, this look, this monk dialogues is a, is an institution that sought to bring

different kinds of people together and make them talk. But there are many others. I'm connected to one, it's called the Renew Democracy Initiative. There's another called Braver Angels. Look around and find in your community or find online, you know, a group that seeks to propagate and talk about and enhance civic conversation. You know, find people who are doing something that you admire and support them. I mean, whether it doesn't have to be giving them money, but sign up for their newsletters,

take part in their events. Participate yourself. I mean, I think that, you know, that, you know, voting, getting your friends to vote, I think those are the kind of the basic activities that almost any citizen can do. And I really want to thank you for this dialogue. You know, I kind of entered this conversation pessimistic and confused, like many are, I think, about the future democracy. You've left me with a sense of flickering hope, maybe more.

And more importantly, I think a sense of agency. We're not without choices, decisions that we can make in our individual lives to continue to steward and foster something that has just been vital to our prosperity, our freedom, so much that we value in our lives. So I want to thank you for leading that conversation globally and for everything that you do and for being part of this conversation today. Thank you, Roger. I really appreciate it. Thanks for listening to The Monk Dialogues with Anne Applebaum. We hope you enjoyed the opportunity to listen to smart conversation about the future of democracy in an era of populist politics and rising authoritarianism. For more information on the Monk Dialogues, visit our website at monkdebates.com slash dialogues. We appreciate your feedback on this podcast.

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